Let’s remember two things here:
- our goal, in terms of kick-up technique, is to achieve frozen kick-ups at the top of the yellow belt mountain.
And the recipe for a frozen kick-up is:
little momentum + good alignment (you rehearsed these when practicing your soft kick-ups) + finger pushing.
- the less our body wiggles in space, the more of a chance we have to hold balance.
Finger pushing is much, much easier done when your legs are tensed, not wobbly like a spaghetti.
This brings us back to the necessity of priming drills we were talking about in the intro.
Tension drills aren’t enjoyable, but if you have a tendency to have your legs all over the shop, you need them.
5 sets, between your warm-up and your kick-up.
Don’t slack.
Do it.
In other words, holding a solid handstand could be summarised as:
Making it possible for your fingers to prevent the body from falling forward too much.
The more your fingers are doing the act of rebalancing, the better, for the smaller the movements, the less likely you are to fall.
For your fingers to do their job, they have to meet the right conditions.
They are extremely picky workers, who will go on strike the moment they feel you are pushing them too much.
Proper working conditions for our fingers involve:
- a correct alignment, in the desirable overshot zone.
- a correct kick-up, using the right degree of momentum for our fingers to be able to act as brakes on a car
- a harmonious relationship between the conscious and the subconscious mind, namely - managing fear.
- a body as still, silent, quiet as possible, for any single movement is likely to make us fall at that stage.
Enters tension.
Holding a handstand initially involves contracting all the segments of the body as much as possible.
Imagine that your body is a wooden stick, at the extremity of which are nestled your fingers.
It is easier at this stage to think of squeezing everything together than to be half released. But there is nothing natural about being THAT tense.
Therefore, it is necessary to teach your body to be as straight and tense as possible, and to maintain for several seconds the tension in the parts of the body that need it the most as we balance:
- the shoulders
- the buttocks
- the toes
- the core... (maybe ? well... more on this later)
This is probably how tense your body, or at least parts of it, are when you kick-up into a handstand. As you can guess, this is simply incompatible with holding a handstand.
When we begin skill acquisition, our capacity to distinguish the bad from the good from the best is limited.
Our level of knowledge is simply too limited for us to grasp the subtleties of the discipline.
One common approach is to invite people to only aim for the best.
This really only works if you have dozens of hours to dedicate to it per week, allowing the learning to be mostly subconscious.
Therefore, I am going to suggest to you that in order for you to know what doing things right feels like, you have to start doing them REALLY wrong.
Back to our cockpit analogy: most elements in our handstands won’t be a button, that you press on and off, but a switch or a lever, that you gradually ramp up or tone down.
Because right and wrong will be a continuum more so than a black and white reality - this will invite you on a journey of exploration where you will find what works for you instead of desperately trying to mimic what seems to be working for others.
This will be true for balance.
This will be true for alignment.
At this level, we will apply this logic to body tension.
Tension in the short-term
In the case of body tension, the goal is to widen the palette of nuances you have at your disposal.
As we embark on this journey, our perceived "maximal" level of tension is actually quite far from our actual maximal level of tension.
We just don't know any better, for we haven't trained our bodies to be tense this way.
Exploring all the colours in the palettes, exploring the two extremities of the continuum, will allow you to know where to set the bar and adjust the nuances of your painting.
And as you are well aware already, I am sure, the art of rebalancing on your hands is a subtle one.
For the first few weeks, try to push it (your level of tension) to the max - you're exploring your limits, awakening your ability to be tense like a stick.
For the reason above-mentioned, and in order for us to be able to tap into any desired level of tension almost immediately, for the next six weeks (usually up to the the first 3 months), we will almost always keep one element of tension in our warm-up, to grease the groove - another very important principle for handbalancing.
I insist because it is particularly important: if you don't get your brain used to isometrically tensing your muscles, you will have a hard time keeping your balance at first.
You will flex an ankle, extend a hip, bend an elbow, squeeze - relax and squeeze again your bum... any of these is enough to impact all your attempts at holding a handstand, especially without a wall.
Tension in the long-term
That doesn't mean you have to be tense to the point where you can't breathe anymore every time you balance.
But you need to learn to be stiff first and then relax the muscles that don't need to be involved one by one - and this is only recommended when you can hold a balance consistently for 10 seconds.
Efficiency in tension will come - but later, once freestanding consistently is already on the horizon.
Too many times have I come across beginners trying in vain to repeat "traditional" balance exercises without making any progress simply because they had ignored some of the fundamentals of body tension.
The tension exercises that we will discuss together work on three levels:
- a conditioning of the nervous system, through several floor exercises, so that the body becomes accustomed to the tension necessary for optimal balance and alignment.
- work on the tension of the diaphragm, abdominals, buttocks and plantar flexion.
- the alignment and positioning of the different segments of the body in relation to each other.
The concept of continuums
I insist because it is particularly important: if you don't get your brain used to isometrically tensing your muscles, you will have a hard time keeping your balance at first.
You will flex an ankle, extend a hip, bend an elbow, squeeze - relax and squeeze again your bum... any of these is enough to impact all your attempts at holding a handstand, especially without a wall.
That doesn't mean you have to be tense to the point where you can't breathe anymore every time you balance.
But you need to learn to be stiff first and then relax the muscles that don't need to be involved one by one - and this is only recommended when you can hold a balance consistently for 10 seconds.
Efficiency in tension will come - but later, once freestanding consistently is already on the horizon.
Too many times have I come across beginners trying in vain to repeat "traditional" balance exercises without making any progress simply because they had ignored some of the fundamentals of body tension.
The tension exercises that we will discuss together work on three levels:
- a conditioning of the nervous system, through several floor exercises, so that the body becomes accustomed to the tension necessary for optimal balance and alignment.
- work on the tension of the diaphragm, abdominals, buttocks and plantar flexion.
- the alignment and positioning of the different segments of the body in relation to each other.
